The Best 1960s Guitarists Of All Time Ranked
A guitarist (or a guitar player) is a person who plays the guitar. Guitarists may play a variety of guitar family instruments such as classical guitars, acoustic guitars, electric guitars, and bass guitars. Some guitarists accompany themselves on the guitar by singing or playing the harmonica, or both. The guitarist may employ any of several methods for sounding the guitar, including finger picking, depending on the type of strings used (either nylon or steel), and including strumming with the fingers, or a guitar pick made of bone, horn, plastic, metal, felt, leather, or paper, and melodic flatpicking and finger-picking. The guitarist may also employ various methods for selecting notes and chords, including fingering, thumbing, the barre (a finger lying across many or all strings at a particular fret), and guitar slides, usually made of glass or metal. These left- and right-hand techniques may be intermixed in performance. Here the best 1960’s Guitarists ranked.
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20. Syd Barrett
“Underrated guitarist. At a time most guitarists were doing the typical blues thing or soloing in the same pentatonic style, Syd would tune his guitar to unique tunings and use a zippo lighter to play slide and used a Binson Echorec to create psychedelic soundscape that ushered in space rock. Not technically great but totally unique.”
19. Duane Allman
“I don’t care who plays the fastest, has the best technique, the slickest… Whatever. It comes down to telling an emotional story, note by note and Duane could do it better than anyone. Add Dickey and they weaved a story untouched by and duo. Then duane adds slide in the mix and just takes your heart and mind to places no guitarist has reached. Just listen to Live At Filmore, considered by many (Rolling Stone, Playboy others) as the best live album ever recorded.”
18. Dickey Betts
“He led a very colorful life but there is no denying he was an immensely top rated guitarist and way, way better than a lot on this list. He was on and off with the Allman Bros. for many years. One time when I went to see the band, he was in jail. According to Rolling Stone, who rated him #61, Duane Allman said “”I’m the famous guitar player,” but Dickey is the good one.” He also wrote “Ramblin’ Man” and “Jessica”.
17. Robby Krieger
“Robby was an average guitarist in what his band was producing. He was a flamenco guitarist, not a rock guitarist. He managed to play rock though and for that I respect him. He was an average rock guitarist; That’s all The Doors needed.”
16. Carlos Santana
“This guy can play anything. He can play great expressive slow blues leads (you want emotional leads, he’s up there with David Gilmour and John Frusciante), he can play virtuoso solos with the best of them, and he’s a genius acoustic guitarist to boot. And with any of these, he’s instantly identifiable, in the way that he uses vertical vibrato or straight tones on held notes instead of standard vibrato, his impeccable sense of complex rhythm and phrasing, and his awesome trill technique.”
15. Mick Taylor
“The heart and soul of The Rolling Stones for 5 brillant years. Listen to his solo on Time Waits For No One, a stunningly beautiful coda to his career with those geezers. Also one of the best slide guitarist around, check out All Down The Line! His vibrato on Love In Vain, off the live Get Your Ya Ya’s Out LP, is exquisite! On his first solo release, simply titled Mick Taylor, he expands his turf to include fusion and does an excellent job. Broken Hands rocks harder than anything the Stones have done since his dep”
14. Brian Jones
“A wonderful all round musician, extremely talented and possibly underestimated by some.
Left us all too soon as do many of the greats of music but Brian’s heart lives on in so many Stones early hits.”
13. John Lennon
“He’s one of the best singers in the world and without him there with be no Beatles and he is the inspiration of all rock and roll guitarist here in the world and he plays the guitar smoothly like playing the guitar and almost dancing in his early years of the Beatles”
12. Ritchie Blackmore
“I love and admire so guitar players for different reasons, to many to list. But the guy who has it all for me is Ritchie Blackmore. He is a true virtuoso of rock guitar, between 1969 and 83 (very long time) he was at the top of the tree. I love Gilmore and Knopfler on record excellent as well as in concert, but, when playing live they can’t really change things around in the Blackmore could (all of purple in fact) Gilmore pretty much plays the same thing every night for every solo just like Knopfler, they don’t take chances like Blackmore.”
11. Frank Zappa
“His playing was typically brilliant — improvising the most intelligent, unique, inspired, moving, and energetic solos I’ve ever heard. While not the most accomplished “technician,” he was the most creative and gifted of them all. Frank released so much material over the years that it’s not possible to do justice to his talent by citing a few albums or song titles. Best to just listen, listen, listen to Zappa’s material released between, say, 1967 and 1987, when his guitar playing was at it’s best and most practiced”
10. Stephen Stills
“Stephen Arthur Stills is an American singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist best known for his work with Buffalo Springfield and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. He is the best acoustic and rythym guitarist I know of. Back in the 70’s he was up there with Clapton in Playboy’s top 10.”
9. Pete Townshend
“Pete Townshend is undoubtely the best rhythm guitarist that rock music has produced to date. He is one of the one of the founding fathers of modern rock and is the one who introduced the gritty sound of the guitar were so used to today. He used power chords extensively, thus laying the foundations for punk rock and came up with some of the catchiest riffs in the history of music.”
8. Jeff Beck
“Jeff Beck is a master of his instrument in a way that very few guitarists on this list are. The way he uses his vibrato, the way he controls his volume and tone from moment to moment, his phrasing, his dynamics…no one does that like Jeff. When guitar legends like Jimmy Page, Tony Iommi and Brian May want to see a guitarist that blows them away, they see Jeff Beck, and any one of them will admit it.”
7. Keith Richards
“Being a good guitarist is more than just playing the song, its about writing music. Everyone on this list is a fantastic guitarist, what makes some stand out more than others are the songs they write, and for me the riffs Keith Richards wrote were the reason the Rolling Stones are so famous. Even today, 50 years later, they are still very catchy and energetic.”
6. Tony Iommi
“The master riff maker! A more iconic a sound has never been heard. Just when you think he has run out of juice he comes out with a whole album of classics, again and again. Even chucking Ozzy didn’t matter the riffs were what mattered. When he dies, I think they will find a stash of riffs he didn’t think were good enough and he would be wrong. I have heard he just writes and writes then writes some more. I can only hope.”
5. Jimmy Page
“This is a difficult distinction to make, but Jimmy Page gets the nod not solely because of his virtuosity, but also because of his songwriting. Everybody on this list can play the hell out the instrument, but it’s the originality and musical intuition that separates the greatest from the greats. Jimmy has a somewhat limited catalog to display his superiority, but he succeeds. He begins his professional career as a studio musician, and moves on to a blues group (The Yardbirds).”
4. George Harrison
“A truly ground breaking guitarist. Do yourselves a favor and YouTube some old (1964) Beatles concerts. George is so composed, technically perfect and fundamental to the sound. Huge hysterical audiences, new to America, redesigning the wheel of popular music and George was unshaken. A tone monster who played with such confidence and professionalism. Very musical in his unique chord voicings and solos. Entirely understated & underrated which was probably the way he wanted it.”
3. John Fogerty
“Absolutely the best guitar soloist ever he wrote so many hits. You have all these hacks who need these different distortion they need to help them sustain notes. Hendricks needed this to be high on list. When needing WA WA pedles these are things he had to have. A lot of tunes you can’t recognize. This slash is the same deal. A lot of crazy sounds that are a cover up the lack of picking all the notes really needed. John foggerty does not need this gritty fill in tricks.”
2. Eric Clapton
“The great B.B. King once said you will never find a guitar genius that can hold down, note to note, to Eric Clapton. He is the “one”. He doesn’t care if he’s in any top list of anything. He has nothing to prove. Kids love to hear a guitarist banging on his guitar, Clapton never does that, He actually knows how to play an instrument. Some oldies but goodies think he is the rebirth of Robert Johnson.”
1. Jimi Hendrix
“Jimi Hendrix revolutionized the playing of the electric guitar. Before Hendrix, guitarists just strummed the guitar, played the chords, maybe picked out a solo melody. Hendrix got sounds out of the guitar that nobody had ever heard. He was THE innovator. He didn’t just accept the guitar method book approach to playing the guitar and approached the instrument as more than just chords and twangy solos. He used the guitar and amplifier together to create even more unique sounds. He was the first to use feedback as a part of his playing. He brought, fuzz and distortion and feedback and reverb into the mainstream of guitar. You want to talk about shredding… Hendrix did it with his teeth.”